UPDATE 2-VeriSign Q4 profit misses Wall Street; shares fall

* Q4 adj. EPS $0.31 vs est. $0.34

* Q4 rev beats estimates

* Shares fall 6 pct after the bell (Adds analysts' comments, conference call details, updates share movement)

By Mansi Dutta

BANGALORE, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Internet security and naming services provider VeriSign Inc (VRSN.O) posted a quarterly profit but missed estimates, hurt partly by higher expenses, sending its shares down 6 percent after the bell.

For the first quarter, VeriSign expects to add between 1.8 million and 2.1 million domain names, roughly flat from the 96.7 million domains it ended the fourth quarter with.

VeriSign has lost some leverage in the authentication business because the average annual unit revenue fell due to mix-shift and growth in the low-cost certificates, Wedbush Morgan analyst Kerry Rice said.

The annualized average unit revenue for VeriSign, GeoTrust and Thawte certificates for the quarter was $228 compared with $324 for the year-ago quarter.

"(VeriSign) could probably take some more of their expenses out as they have divested their non-core assets; that overhead has not come down as fast as people were expecting," Rice added.

Since 2007, the company has been selling its slower-growing units to focus on its core businesses.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Joel Fishbein said operating margins came in less than expected at 36.8 percent.

"We were looking at 39 percent, so I think they still have some work to do on the expense side of the business."

For the fourth quarter, the company posted net income of $92 million, or 48 cents a share, compared with a loss of $96 million, or 50 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, it earned 31 cents per share.

Revenue for the company, which serves as the global registry for .com, .net, .tv, .cc, .name and .jobs domain names, rose 6 percent to $263 million.

Analysts on average expected the company to earn 34 cents a share, on revenue of $260.8 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

General and administrative expenses increased mainly due to a $4 million out-of-period depreciation adjustment, the company said.

VeriSign shares were trading down 6 percent at $22.18 after the bell. They closed at $23.42 Tuesday on Nasdaq. (Reporting by Mansi Dutta; Editing by Unnikrishnan Nair)